After paying my fee, we stepped into the room. It looked like a cyber café from the nineties: long tables lined with computer terminals, but also a few overstuffed easy chairs where people sat reading. Through the windows on the far wall, afternoon sun fell in rectangles on the floor. A door off to the side was shut tight, a paper sign taped to it: QUIET. “Here you are,” the employee said quietly. “If you’ll notice, time has stopped.” I tugged back the sleeve of my dress and glanced at my wristwatch. The second hand hovered mid-tick, perfectly still. “Once…
I’m loathe to give a single penny to tax prep software because some significant percentage of money they take in gets redistributed in a lobbying effort to make sure that Congress keeps our tax code complicated and does absolutely nothing to simplify tax preparation for Americans. But I’m way too lazy to actually prepare my taxes by hand. That’s fairly complicated, error-prone and annoying. Normally I pick the cheapest tax prep software I can find. This year and last year, that meant OLT (OnLine Taxes). The cheaper software works fine, but the biggest limitation is that it won’t import forms…